Cemre Güngör, http://cem.re

I don't think they are concerned at all about porn material. Most of my non-tech friends know tumblr as a "porn blogging" service.

http://gawker.com/5843915/the-po...

As far as I know Etsy's office in San Francisco consists mainly of support folks.

Hyperakt is one, they've done stuff for Wired and GOOD.

Facebook is a good example. Go to Facebook with a specific task in hand (say, message a friend)– most of the time you get sucked into personally relevant information being thrown at you from all sides, as demonstrated by Adisa's answer.

In addition, notifications and incoming messages and friend requests are presented as things that require immediate attention, so you are motivated to process those before attempting to carry out your task. You're drawn further and further away from your task in hand.

Fab (gay social network) > Fab (daily deals) > Fab (Gilt for designer objects)
Stickybits > Turntable.fm

I'd recommend Donald Norman's newer book "Emotional Design".

"The Design of Everyday Things" was a book about (just) UI and Usability, "Emotional Design" definitely goes further into the affective aspects, thus being a valuable UX resource.

When hunch started in 2009, they were a decision making tool for consumers (that's what I remember of it when I tried it out. It asked you a series of questions to determine for example if you should have a beard or not).

At some point they pivoted and became a general–use machine learning API, instead of being a destination site.

For example, using hunch's API you can easily add recommendations to your existing website.

You can create a big rectangle that covers the whole image, and use the pathfinder ("subtract") tool to subtract the content from the rectangle, resulting in the effect you want.

Photoshop is terribly suited for web design. Unfortunately most out there regard web design as "designing pictures of web pages", making it a popular tool.

See: Should user interface designers be able to build what they design?

Product Design Guild launched in Fall 2010 and is rocking!

It's an event where you get to pair with other designers to get feedback about your work and vice-versa. A designer hackathon, one might say :)

http://www.productdesignguild.com

The Summit can be kind of packed, but out of all spaces mentioned, it's the one the most suitable for work. High ceilings and big desks make it a great atmosphere. Relatively quiet as well.

http://www.thesummit-sf.com/

Dopplr has been abandoned since 2009 since Nokia bought them. Tripit got bought too, but their new owner company seems to be interested in continuing development.

Dribbble lacks good discussion for the most part. Almost all feedback is mutual back-patting. They should make a point to not let users comment if they don't have anything substantial to say.

I noticed Jonas' post on Hacker News, reached out to him on Twitter, then pitched myself on an email. That's how I got the invite.

Lemonade Stand (http://lmnd.st) from the NYC bus got good traction: somebody built a Windows Phone 7 app using their API, a couple of people sold their badges using it at SXSW, they were in a bunch of media outlets as well.

Participants are required to pay a deposit of $200, and it was said that part might be refunded.

I'm very fond of Espresso's "workspace", since I almost always end up with too many tabs with Coda or TextMate. This one function makes Espresso many orders of magnitude more useful to me.

Usable.

Not so usable.

It depends on how many editable items there are on the page. The more there are, the more subtle the invitation to edit should be.

What helps Flickr create the editable affordance without being too obvious is having placeholders in their empty fields ("Click to enter"). It demonstrates the user that fields of similar placement are editable, but this assumes most of the fields will be empty at first. Once the field is filled, the only cue about being editable is the hover color and cursor. We make an optimistic assumption that once the user edits a field this way, s/he learns the behavior.

Facebook has a "Add a caption" placeholder styled as a regular link, and once content is added, a small pencil icon is displayed to the left of the field. This is a more obvious invitation, but would get repetitive on a page with many editable fields.

I'd like to see more constructive, in-depth feedback, more 'rebounds', and less mutual back patting on dribbble. 

I also agree that dribbble is mostly eye-candy, so trying to find out someone's Product Design / UX skills over dribbble shots wouldn't be easy.

EDIT: This has been debunked, check the comments.
While most probably know about it, this article has some insight as to how Apple's UI design team works:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_...
It's based on an Apple engineer's presentation at SXSW.